Maker: Space Cowboys
Title: Unlock!
Game: Hollywood Confidential
Year: 2024 (for the box set)
Price: $36.99
Language: English
Internet access req’d?: No
Cipher types: Steganography and a word anagram
Players: 1-6
Difficulty: 2 of 3
Rating: 3.5
(Box artwork and story (c) Space Cowboys)
Hollywood Confidential is the second of three games in the Extraordinary Adventures box set. As such, it’s marked as a difficulty of 2 out of 3. Note that you need the app from the Apple or Google play stores running on a mobile device. Otherwise, there’s no other need to access internet during the game.
(Starting props – the deck and the app on the tablet)
Story: You’re the assistant to famed 1950’s hard-nosed P.D. (private detective) Jack Marlowe. You get a call from your boss, but it is cut off in mid-sentence, so you rush to the office only to find a mess, and Marlowe missing. You need to figure out his latest case, and get him back to work so you’ll continue to get paid. Slacker.
(Start card)
In contrast to Restart, the artwork is much better again, as is the music (although I didn’t listen to much of it). You get two special buttons in the app – Phone and Machine. Phone works just like in the earlier Sherlock Holmes games, where you have to enter a location name in order to get the number of the next card to pull. This is a bit tricky, because often entering just part of a location name won’t be enough (e.g. – you need to use “Jack Marlowe;” “Jack” and “Marlowe” will get you “no such location” errors). There are 6-8 locations in the game. There are also 6 machines. Three are just fancier versions of “push a button.” One is a still image, another is a “find Waldo,” and there’s one shooting simulator mini-game.
I brought the game, camera and one prop (a newspaper sheet) with me to the coffee shop, and initially I did pretty well. About halfway through the game, I ran into my old nemesis – Unlock’s crappy in-app hint system. I got stuck on one specific riddle, and spent an hour going through all of the cards trying to figure out if I’d missed something. In the end, at a full 60 minutes over the 60-minute limit, I gave up, turned off the tablet and returned home.
(Newspaper prop)
I checked out the walkthrough PDF for the game on my laptop, and discovered that there’s one disguised steganography puzzle that I completely failed to recognize, which translated to a visitable location. I’d gotten so focused on the idea of using the phone app, it never occurred to me that not all locations would be identified by name. And there weren’t any in-app hints for this specific puzzle.
At home, I started a new game, and tried again. I didn’t bother trying to record my first play through stats, and I didn’t like the game enough to feel like doing a third play through speed run. The shoot-em up mini game wasn’t that much fun either (you have a gang shoot-out, with civilians popping up like mushrooms). Every civilian you hit, or mobster you miss, penalizes you by one minute. There’s a time-out that ends the mini-game if you have trouble picking out the proper targets. I finished the second game in 38 minutes, with no hints and 9 penalties. Because I’d only gotten through the first half of the game on the first try, I still needed a lot of time making it through the second half.
One kind of tricky part is where you get permission to look at the newspaper prop, and some of the words have been cut out. This is like an anagram where you have to guess at which words were removed from the paper, and then rearrange them to make a new sentence. My problem here was that some of the sentences could be completed with more than one specific word (i.e. – “quick and [blank]” could be “quick and easy” or “quick and dirty”), and a few of my choices turned out to be wrong for the riddle. Therefore, as I was getting toward the end of the game and about to be interrupted yet again by outside reality, I cheated and glanced at the walkthrough. After that point, I finished the game on my own a couple minutes later.
(Play through two stats screen)
Overall, I have mixed emotions about Hollywood Confidential. It’s not that it’s significantly harder than a rating of 2 out of 3 would imply, but the hint system is broken and where a simple gentle nudge from the hints would be enough, there’s nothing for the riddles that really need the clues the most. Then, after getting frustrated by the “what words does the phone app want” guessing game, I just didn’t have the patience for the other stuff, such as a forced musical interlude, and the mini-shooting game. I did enjoy the puzzles I managed to solve on my own, but not enough to convince me to play it again.
Is Hollywood Confidential fun? In places
Is there any replay value? Maybe once
Can you gift the finished game to someone else? Yes
Does it have ciphers? One steg, and a word anagram
(Photo close-up – “Somebody here call for a doctor?”)
One of the more interesting parts of the game is that the “NPC” character art features the likenesses of famous 50’s actors and actresses. Plus, there’s a nice callback to The Seventh Screening. Otherwise, I recommend the game only to the harder-core escape room solvers.
===== Caution – Spoilers =====
You start out in Marlowe’s office, where you get a gun, a notepad and pencil, $10, a broken phone plus a directory, and your “muscle” (if you have to strong arm someone). From the clues, it looks like a police detective had been there earlier, possibly investigating your boss for involvement with Communist sympathizers. However, your boss is being framed and is currently in the hands of the FBI. At the same time, he’d been hired by a Russian princess to prove whether her husband had been cheating on her with a budding actress/nightclub singer, which introduces some involvement by the Mafia. You know, Raymond Chandler stuff.
Turns out the local Godfather had commissioned some of his men to steal some reels of film the husband, a movie producer, had been working on in order to ransom them back to the princess. She’s the one with the money and brains behind her husband, and she promises to fix everything between Marlowe and the FBI if you get the reels for her. That then becomes the game’s end goal.
(Card examples)
The location of the reels is given in the prop newspaper, if you can figure out what the missing words are, and arrange them into their proper order. I had trouble with this, and filled in a couple words wrong because of the ambiguity (such as with the phrase “dead and [blank]” which could be “dead and gone” or “dead and buried”).
The place where I had the most trouble was when I needed the instructions to get to the princess’ Hollywood villa. Up to that point, there were place names on the cards that could be entered in the directory app. But for the villa, all I got was a set of written instructions (head NE, go west, take a short path north, get on a roundabout, go north, then head east). Again, I was looking for a map shop in the directory, or a gas station. In fact, this is steganography, and if you draw out your path on paper you’ll get a 2-digit card number. Sigh. Everything else is more-or-less solvable with simple logic and observation.
I mentioned above that there’s a forced musical interlude. Fairly early in the game, you have to stop at a jazz club. The female vocalist is just starting the last song of the night, and you have to wait until she finishes. I didn’t time it very carefully, but the song seems to be 3 minutes long, and there’s nothing else you can do in the meantime. Afterward, you’re told that she’s in her dressing room, and you probably know the polite way to ask if you can come in (similar to the trick in Restart).
The Black Chamber 